Fredrick Brown - Night of the Jabberwock

He said, "Glad you got here early, Doc. It's damn dull this evening."

"It's dull every evening in Carmel City," I told him. "And most of the time I like it. But Lord, if only something would happen just once on a Thursday evening, I'd love it. Just once in my long career, I'd like to have one hot story to break to a panting public."

"Hell, Doc, nobody looks for hot news in a country weekly."

"I know," I said. "That's why I'd like to fool them just once. I've been running the Clarion twenty-three years. One hot story. Is that much to ask?"

Smiley frowned. "There've been a couple of burglaries. And one murder, a few years ago."

"Sure," I said, "and so what? One of the factory hands out at Bonney's got in a drunken argument with another and hit him too hard in the fight they got into. That's not murder; that's manslaughter, and anyway it happened on a Saturday and it was old stuff — everybody in town knew about it — by the next Friday when the Clarion came out."

"They buy your paper anyway, Doc. They look for their names for having attended church socials and who's got a used washing machine for sale and — want a drink?"

"It's about time one of us thought of that," I said.

He poured a shot for me and, so I wouldn't have to drink alone, a short one for himself. We drank them and I asked him, "Think Carl will be in tonight?"

I meant Carl Trenholm, the lawyer, who's about my closest friend in Carmel City, and one of the three or four in town who play chess and can be drawn into an intelligent discussions of something besides crops and politics. Carl often dropped in Smiley's on Thursday evenings, knowing that I always came in for at least a few drinks after putting the paper to bed.

"Don't think so," Smiley said. "Carl was in most of the afternoon and got himself kind of a snootful, to celebrate. He got through in court early and he won his case. Guess he went home to sleep it off."

I said, "Damn. Why couldn't he have waited till this evening? I'd have helped him — Say, Smiley, did you say Carl was celebrating because he won that case? Unless we're talking about two different things, he lost it. You mean the Bonney divorce?"

"Yeah."

"Then Carl was representing Ralph Bonney, and Bonney's wife won the divorce."

"You got it that way in the paper, Doc?"

"Sure," I said. "It's the nearest thing I've got to a good story this week."

Smiley shook his head. "Carl was saying to me he hoped you wouldn't put it in, or anyway that you'd hold it down to a short squib, just the fact that she got the divorce."

I said, "I don't get it, Smiley. Why? And didn't Carl lose the case?"

Smiley leaned forward confidentially across the bar, although he and I were the only ones in his place. He said, "It's like this, Doc. Bonney wanted the divorce. That wife of his was a bitch, see? Only he didn't have any grounds to sue on, himself — not any that he'd have been willing to bring up in court, anyway, see? So he — well, kind of bought his freedom. Gave her a settlement if she'd do the suing, and he admitted to the grounds she gave against him. Where'd you get your version of the story?"

"From the judge," I said.

"Well, he just saw the outside of it. Carl says Bonney's a good joe and those cruelty charges were a bunch of hokum. He never laid a hand on her. But the woman was such hell on wheels that Bonney'd have admitted to anything to get free of her. And give her a settlement of a hundred grand on top of it. Carl was worried about the case because the cruelty charges were so damn silly on the face of them."

"Hell," I said, "that's not the way it's going to sound in the Clarion."

"Carl was saying he knew you couldn't tell the truth about the story, but he hoped you'd play it down. Just saying Mrs. B. had been granted a divorce and that a settlement had been made, and not putting in anything about the charges."

I thought of my one real story of the week, and how carefully I'd enumerated all those charges Bonney's wife bad made against him, and I groaned at the thought of having to rewrite or cut the story. And cut it I'd have to, now that I knew the facts.

I said, "Damn Carl, why didn't he come and tell me about it before I wrote the story and put the paper to bed?"

"He thought about doing that, Doc. And then he decided he didn't want to use his friendship with you to influence the way you reported news."

"The damn fool," I said. "And all he had to do was walk across the street."

"But Carl did say that Bonney's a swell guy and it would be a bad break for him if you listed those charges because none of them were really true and—"

"Don't rub it in," I interrupted him. "I'll change the story. If Carl says it's that way, I'll believe him. I can't say that the charges weren't true, but at least I can leave them out."

"That'd be swell of you, Doc."

"Sure it would. All right, give me one more drink, Smiley, and I'll go over and catch it before Pete leaves."

I had the one more drink, cussing myself for being sap enough to spoil the only mentionable story I had, but knowing I had to do it. I didn't know Bonney personally, except just to say hello to on the street, but I did know Carl Trenholm well enough to be damn sure that if he said Bonney was in the right, the story wasn't fair the way I'd written it. And I knew Smiley well enough to be sure he hadn't given me a bum steer on what Carl had really said.

So I grumbled my way back across the street and upstairs to the Clarion office. Pete was just tightening the chase around the front page.

He loosened the quoins when I told him what we had to do, and I walked around the stone so I could read the story again, upside down, of course, as type is always read.

The first paragraph could stand as written and could constitute the entire story. I told Pete to put the rest of the type in the hell-box and I went over to the case and set a short head in tenpoint, "Bonney Divorce Granted," to replace the twenty-four point head that had been on the longer story. I handed Pete the stick and watched while he switched heads.

"Leaves about a nine-inch hole in the page," he said. "What'll we stick in it?"

I sighed. "Have to use filler," I told him. "Not on the front page, but we'll have to find something on page four we can move front and then stick in nine inches of filler where it came from."

I wandered down the stone to page four and picked up a pica stick to measure things. Pete went over to the rack and got a galley of filler. About the only thing that was anywhere near the right size was the story that Clyde Andrews, Carmel City's banker and leading light of the local Baptist Church, had given me about the rummage sale the church had planned for next Tuesday evening.

It wasn't exactly a story of earth-shaking importance, but it would be about the right length if we reset it indented to go in a box. And it had a lot of names in it, and that meant it would please a lot of people, and particularly Clyde Andrews, if I moved it up to the front page.

So we moved it. Rather, Pete reset it for a front page box item while I plugged the gap in page four with filler items and locked up the page again. Pete had the rummage sale item reset by the time I'd finished with page four, and this time I waited for him to finish up page one, so we could go to Smiley's together.

I thought about .that front page while I washed my hands. The Front Page. Shades of Hecht and MacArthur. Poor revolving Horace Greeley.

Now I really wanted a drink.

Pete was starting to pound out a stone proof and I told him not to bother. Maybe the customers would read page one, but I wasn't going to. And if there was an upside-down headline or a pied paragraph, it would probably be an improvement.

Pete washed up and we locked the door. It was still early for a Thursday evening, not much after seven. I should have been happy about that, and I probably would have been if we'd had a good paper. As for the one we'd just put to bed, I wondered if it would live until morning.